Nonprofits, Public Media, Strategy & Planning, Double the Donation, Public Media CRM

In this immersive joint webinar, Double the Donation and Allegiance Group + Pursuant share a matching gift industry overview, diving into the latest corporate philanthropy trends and an in-depth analysis of the most common roadblocks to avoid when crafting your own matching gift fundraising plan.

We also share an exclusive demo of the leading automated matching gift solution, 360MatchPro, which is designed to educate and empower donors to submit their matching gift requests (without requiring any operational lift from your team).

Through this seamless integration with the Allegiance Group + Pursuant platform, your organization can identify match-eligible donors, drive them to submit matching gift requests and track valuable insights – all resulting in greater revenue for your organization.

Transcript

Sarah: Good afternoon, everybody. And welcome to today’s webinar. My name is Sarah and I’m one of the senior services consultants here at Allegiance. And today I am pleased to have a guest presenter, Julia Beltran the partnerships manager at Double the Donation.

I’m just going to go ahead and turn it over to Julia right away so we can get started. She’s got a slide deck to do, and then I will start my slide deck a little bit later. Let’s get this show on the road, Julia.

Julia: Perfect. Thanks so much, Sarah. Hey everybody, like Sarah said, my name is Julia, I’m the partnerships manager at Double the Donation. So that just means I get to work with our awesome partners like Allegiance Group + Pursuant to help bring matching gift research, resources, and solutions to fundraisers like you guys. So really excited to talk today a little bit about matching gifts. I’m going to kick off today’s presentation with a matching gift industry review.

And so this is a really educational section of our presentation, whether you’re already really familiar with matching gifts and a lot about how your organization is raising money through that avenue, or maybe you’re totally new to matching gifts and this is something you’re just beginning to explore, I think you’ll learn a lot during this section. And that will also be really helpful to everybody, I think, to really set the stage for what best practices can help you raise more matching gifts and how Allegiance’s matching gift integration can help you do that. So this is going to give a lot of context, really for the second section of our presentation in which we’ll actually give a demo of Allegiance’s integration with 360MatchPro.

So 360MatchPro is Double the Donation’s matching gift automated solution, making it really easy to drive matching gift revenue. And then of course we will have the Q and A at the end, like Sarah mentioned. So definitely feel free to put your questions in either the question or chat bar on the side of the screen here, and then I’ll answer them all at the end, just because I know sometimes I’ll begin to answer questions as I go through the presentation.

So definitely put them in as you think of them, just so you don’t forget. And then at the end, we’ll circle back and make sure everyone’s questions are answered. And like Sarah said, too, you guys can always reach out to Double the Donation if you want to chat about matching gifts, whether that’s something about our specific solution or maybe you just have a question about more of the educational components, always happy to talk about that.

So you can definitely reach out to us as well through there. I think one of the handouts should have some contact information. I’ll also have that on one of the slides as well. And then right now I’m just putting in the chat a way that you can always reach me, which is at [email protected].

So kicking things off, I do want to give a little bit of context into the Allegiance Group + Pursuant and Double the Donation partnership, just in case anyone’s totally new to Double the Donation and what we do. So we are an integration partner with Allegiance. That means we have a turnkey technical solution, like I said, 360MatchPro to allow you to raise more in matching gifts, but that does go beyond just the solution we provide.

We do a lot of research on matching gift and corporate philanthropy fundraising at Double the Donation. And we really want to share those insights with fundraisers like you guys. So through this partnership, hopefully we can provide you a lot of interesting information about matching gifts and even the broader corporate philanthropy industry.

And so starting out with our matching gift industry review, I want to zoom out a little bit, like I said, in case anyone’s a bit new to this world and talk about what matching gifts are exactly and how they really fit into the corporate philanthropy landscape. So matching gifts are of course the type of corporate philanthropy in which some kind of company, some kind of entity will actually match the charitable donations that their employees are making.

So this is one of the most common forms of corporate philanthropy. You can see, I also list like volunteer grants, employee grant stipends, maybe some other ones you guys are familiar with, but matching gifts are the most common. And I think they’re actually also the easiest to take advantage of. So if you’re just dipping your toe into corporate philanthropy and like seeing what avenue might work best for you, definitely recommend matching gifts as it’s the most profitable and the most common.

And so when we think about matching gifts, a lot of times we picture a company giving an equal gift to the nonprofit after one of their employees donated to that nonprofit, which is true. But sometimes there’s a bit more nuance to it than that. So I have a bunch of components listed on the screen here.

And the first one I want to talk about is organization eligibility. And so by that, I mean that not all institutions qualify for every single, organization’s matching gift program. So when a corporation creates a matching gift program, they get to decide whatever parameters that they want to include in their program itself.

And so sometimes organizations might not match to strictly political nonprofits or maybe they won’t match to strictly religious nonprofits. But in general, most 501c3 organizations do qualify for the majority of matching gift programs. But I think it’s important think of that as we talk about matching gifts, is that not every single company will match to every single nonprofit or fundraiser.

The next component I want to mention is matching gift receipt ratio. And that’s because not all matching gift programs offer exact matches, like it may sound like. So many companies do match it like that one-to-one ratio I mentioned, but others will actually double or even triple an employee’s donation.

And so those match issues can vary depending on like the donor’s employment status or even the nonprofits receiving that fund. So it can tie back to the eligibility component, right? Like maybe a company will match at a one-to-one ratio for most 501c3s, but they have some sort of strong tie to some college or something like that, and they’ll actually match it a two to one ratio at their chosen organization. We also sometimes see like a 0.5 to one match or people will matching like 0.5 of a gift from a retired employee, but maybe a one to one ratio of a full-time employee, something like that.

And that kind of ties well into the third one I have here, which is employee eligibility. So, like I said, some companies will only match from full-time employees, but I actually see that becoming more and more rare as I look at matching gift companies. We’ve seen a lot of them improve their different components.

And so many companies will actually match both part-time employee’s donations as well as for full-time. And then some of the top programs from like bigger companies will actually also match for retirees, or even the spouses of current or retired employees. So also something important to think about when you look at your matching gift eligibility of your donors, that sometimes even if you might not have a donor who initially seems like they’d qualify for a matching gift program, it’s very possible that they may be retired from a company that will match their gift, or even have a spouse that works for a company that will match it.

Number four I have here is gift amount and that’s because every program sets a maximum and minimum donation amount that they’re willing to match. So those parameters can really vary widely, honestly, depending on the program. But I will say, I see most companies set their minimums between about $1 and a hundred dollars.

And then the most common minimum by far being about 25. And then maximums typically range between 1,000 and 15,000. Most Fortune 500 level corporations coming in around 10,000. So pretty large amounts. If you have a couple donors making $10,000 gifts, a major gift and they’re able to get that matched by their employer, that obviously can be a really significant source of revenue. So definitely something important to keep in mind.

And then number five. And this is probably one of the most important pieces here is that there’s always some sort of expiration date around matching gift requests. So a lot of companies will give their employee maybe a year after the donation to submit their request.

Others might set specific dates timed around the end of a calendar year or tax season. But also just really important to think about you can’t really get gifts matched from three years ago or something like that. So really all of this to say is that if you think about matching gifts for your organization, as I go through today’s presentation, don’t forget that these programs are really not all exactly the same, and therefore your donors are having to navigate different parameters like these ones when they request a gift match. So later on, we’ll get into the best practices of how to account for those parameters, but just important to remember, it’s not as simple as just asking your donor to get their gift match from their employer.

And so now some good news, and that is that matching gift opportunities are everywhere. I know I mentioned earlier it’s one of the most common forms of corporate philanthropy and we see well over half of Fortune 500 organizations offering these matching gift programs. And that of course means that millions and millions of individuals qualify to get their gifts matched through these programs.

And then also there’s plenty of other corporations of different sizes that still offer their matching gift programs to employees. I know I’m focusing a lot on these larger corporate scales, like obviously Fortune 500 companies, but that’s not to say that smaller organizations don’t offer matching gift programs because they certainly do.

And so that of course means that if you have donors who work for any one of these companies, then their donations could very easily be doubled or like we said, sometimes even tripled without actually having to ask those donors for any more of their own dollars. So these donors don’t have to reach back into their own wallets, but they can make that contribution go twice as far.

And your donor acquisition cost is the same, but you’re getting a double donation. And I think important to note here is that matching gifts are not necessarily industry-specific. I know sometimes it’s easy to assume that only outwardly advertising social good style organizations might offer matching gift programs, but it’s not like the company has to be B Corp certified or maybe an outwardly philanthropic organization to offer a matching gift program.

So I’ve pulled a bunch of different companies that offer matching gifts, and you can see it’s really across different industries. I have like food and beverage on here, entertainment, tech, banking. It’s really all different companies that offer matching gifts. And so when you’re thinking about your fundraising plans, make sure that you’re not excluding certain donors, just because maybe they don’t work for an organization that you typically associate with a particular charity or cause.

And so despite this giant industry and ever improving programs, we still see nonprofits really miss out on employer matching gifts. And by that, I mean that $4-7 billion in matching gift funds going completely unclaimed every single year. And so that means that we know donors are foreseeing donations, but no, one’s actually tying those donations back to the corporate entities that might match the gift.

And so I know when you think about that in regards to your own organization, it can be a little bit shocking to know that these programs are designed for you, but that’ll a lot of organizations really are missing out on that cash. It’s really being left on the table. And so because of that, we see most fundraising institutions receive less than 2% of individual contributions coming in and matching gifts when it really could be closer to 10 to 15, depending on your organization and the donors that you serve.

And so why the discrepancy of course, like why is there this huge revenue gap in matching gifts? And so I think to answer that question, we have to look back at the matching gift process. If a donor wants their gift matched, they need to submit a matching gift request to their employer themselves.

Most employers don’t let nonprofits submit the matches. They don’t let third parties like Double the Donation, submit the matches. It needs to be the donor that gives approval to get that gift matched. And so after a donor makes a contribution, they would have to submit their request to their employer, of course, and that tells them the amount that they donated and the receipt maybe, they then have to get that request approved from the company.

And then your nonprofit would receive the matching gift. So it’s really step two here of the donor submitting the matching gift requests, that that’s where the problem lies, that’s where we’re seeing this kind of process fall off. And so donors aren’t submitting their matching gift requests because they don’t want to, it’s because they don’t know that they have a matching gift program.

We see almost 80% of match-eligible donors, so people that could get a match, completely unaware that their employer offers a matching gift program. And so that leaves only 7% of match-eligible donors actually submitting a matching gift request, which is a pretty sad number. And so that lack of donor action is really a lack of awareness.

And the kind of complicated part of this problem too, I think is that even if your donors know that a matching gift program exists for them, they probably don’t really understand the steps that they then have to take to actually pursue that matching gift. And that really makes sense when you think about it, like most people outside of this industry really don’t know a lot about matching gift funds. And so it’s not really that donors don’t want to send in a matching gift request it’s that they don’t even know what’s an option. And so this idea that donors want to submit a matching gift requests, but just don’t know how is exemplified through a lot of the research that we’ve done at Double the Donation.

So I have three statistics up on the screen right here, and you can see that donors are more likely to donate if they’re gifts are going to be matched. They’re more likely to respond to general fundraising appeals, if they know their gift will be matched. And they’re actually more likely to donate even more money.

They’re going to be more likely to give a higher initial base donation if they know that their gifts can be matched. And really, when you think about it, I think all of this makes perfect sense. Your donors are people who care about your cause, they want to help your mission. Of course, they’re going to feel happy knowing that they just gave a contribution to this cause that they care about.

And really, they’re increasing that donation amount at no extra cost to them. They’re increasing their impact, but not having to make any additional gift. And so if donors want to submit matching gift requests and they just don’t know about them, then the main problem we need to solve is what we called the donor awareness gap.

Donors don’t know about matching gift programs, but if they were just educated about gift matching, research consistently shows that they’re going to take action on that.

And so when we think about our existing strategy, we know of course from everything I just said that the most important step here would be educating donors on matching gifts. So people just don’t know that you can submit a matching gift request. Why don’t we tell them? And then of course empowering them to actually submit that request.

It can be really daunting of course, for donors to actually go and submit their requests. I think that’s especially compounded if they’re really not familiar with the program, and you think about initially telling someone, hey, you should ask your employer if they’ll give an additional gift to us, someone doesn’t know about matching gift programs or how CSR programs typically work, that might seem like an odd request.

And then of course, tracking your success. Any time you’re pulling any kind of data about your donors, giving them calls to actions, obviously really important to make sure that you keep a pulse on those types of activities and how they’re reacting to your messaging and what actions they’re taking after you prompt them to do so.

And so the cool thing is that this is obviously a big ask, right? You’re already communicating a lot with your donors. You probably have a lot of messaging and things that you want to tell them. But that Allegiance and Double the Donation solution 360MatchPro does make it really easy to do all of this.

And so you certainly could manually try to identify where your donors work, see what their matching gift parameters are, and then instruct them to take action to submit their matching gift requests. But as you can imagine, that’s a really, time-draining activity to do that. And so we’re able to automate this process with 360MatchPro and Allegiance.

And so how it works is that with this integrated solution, donors can make a gift on your giving form like normal, and they’re actually able to identify their corporate match eligibility on the form itself. So by that, I mean that if someone’s going through the donation process, 360MatchPro is able to find out where that donor works and then see if they qualify for a matching gift program.

Then 360MatchPro can provide next steps directly on the confirmation page. So after the donation has been submitted after that conversion has already been completed, 360MatchPro can give your donors a direct link to their matching gift request form once we know where they work. So that means it can really kick off the process with just one click. 360MatchPro also does send automated matching gift messaging, which is really cool.

That means we can give next steps via email. We can provide that link again to their matching gift request form. Or we can even identify donors through that email if they didn’t interact with the tool on the donation form. And then 360MatchPro does deliver actual analytics back to your organization. So we’re really tracking the way that donors interact with our solution.

We’re seeing where they work in storing that information. We’re giving both aggregated and individualized data to nonprofits. So making sure that whatever solutions you’re putting out there, you have a really clear pulse on exactly how it’s working and what’s working for you. And so I’m going to go into each of these steps in a little more detail before I pull up my demo and show you guys an example in action.

So first I mentioned that giving form component. This is how we’re going to find out which of your donors actually qualify for a matching gift program. And so how it works is that you’d have a regular donation form available to you guys, but then there’s going to be an option to see if your employer will match your contribution.

And so this is just a field on the donation form where the donor can enter their information, but it’s not a typical plain text field. Because if it was just a plain text field, not only would that be a lot of information to figure out what next steps the donor would need, but also if you’ve ever worked in any kind of like employer data reconciliation, I’m sure you’ve seen how many different naming conventions that maybe you couldn’t even think of originally that donors can come up with.

For example, if you have you ever tried to do any kind of employer mapping before, you might have records of Home Depot, The Home Depot Corporation, things like that in your system. And that can be really hard to reconcile when the time comes to do that. So this search field takes away the guesswork from that. As a donor starts to type, it starts to pull entries from our matching gift database and it provides them with the company option to select, to ensure that everybody has the same naming convention.

Also, this is really cool because it can account for like subsidiaries and parent companies. So for example, let’s say you have a donor that works for ESPN corporation. That’s actually managed by the Walt Disney Corporation that’s who owns ESPN. And because of that, Walt Disney manages ESPN employees matching gift programs because Walt Disney, the parent company is what’s in charge of that CSR initiative.

And so if you have a donor typing into the search field and they type in ESPN, they’ll be able to select the option that says ESPN, but we’ll make sure that they’re matched to the Walt Disney’s appropriate CSR matching gifts submission form following the donation. And also of course, if there, for some reason is a company that isn’t in our database, we’re still going to store that information so that then we can look into it and find out if their employer does have a matching gift program after they filled out the donation form.

So really all of that to say this search field is very advanced and it allows your donors to go through their typical donation process while still allowing you to identify which of them could present a matching gift opportunity. And like I said, once the donor enters their employer name, 360MatchPro is storing that information because on the donation confirmation page, we want to give your donor the appropriate next steps.

So that means that the confirmation page will allow the donor to kick off the matching gift process with just one click. So they can go directly to their matching gift form, they can see their matching gift program guidelines, and we even summarize those guidelines for them on the confirmation screen.

Important to note, this does happen after the donations already been submitted. We never want to pull people away from your donation forms. So this would never populate unless the donor has actually clicked that submit button and given their initial gift. And then step three we have on here is automated emails.

So I touched on this before a little bit that post-transaction, donors can receive follow-up emails that are all completely configured by the nonprofit themselves. These emails are important because they also contain a direct link to the employer matching gift request page. As I’m sure you guys know, sometimes people might need a second call to action before they actually kick off something like a matching gift process.

So we don’t want to just stop on the confirmation page. We want to give people the power to kick off the matching gift process from their email as well. And so again, these emails are storing the employer information from the donation form. So it’s providing donors with a personalized experience here, right?

So let’s say that your donor Jenny works for the Home Depot. She submitted her donation and indicated she works for the Home Depot. She would receive an email saying, hey, did you know, the Home Depot has a matching gift program, select the option below to kick off your matching gift requests. So it would be very clear that she was getting her own matching gift request form that she could kick off from that email.

I think these are really cool too, because they can also give you a bit more space to explain matching gift programs. So on the confirmation page, you obviously only have so much real estate. Maybe you have other calls to action on there, or you have a receipts or EIN number, things like that.

And so it’s really neat on here because you can talk a little bit more about matching gifts. Maybe give your donors a chance to understand their programs a bit better and learn a bit more about what kind of opportunities they could qualify for through their matching gift program. And I know I mentioned this briefly, but also to note, these emails are completely customizable, even though they’re coming from 360MatchPro, it’s going to have all of the nonprofit’s messaging, their logo, their colors, whatever else you want to incorporate into that to make it customized, you certainly can. And something cool about these emails too, is that we do follow a best practice of sending the emails after the donation process, but not immediately after. And so that’s important because you don’t want to ever give your donors a matching gift call to action when they might mistake your email as some kind of proof of purchase or receipt.

So as you probably imagine, most people don’t open receipt emails, or if they do, they definitely don’t expect any kind of action to be taken from their receipt email, so you want to make sure that you send matching gift emails with a slight delay, after the donation process so that it’s not discarded as a proof of purchase.

And I can share this configuration steps within 360MatchPro. That’s all something that could be customized by you, if you choose to use the automated matching gift emails. And then finally, another customization piece of this is that you can configure the email sending domain this message comes from, so that it’s a familiar domain to your donors. Like this would never come from Double the Donation or 360MatchPro or anything like that. It would come from your organization’s name, ensuring that it doesn’t get caught in a spam filter and that your donor feels comfortable interacting with the email.

Something else to note with the automated emails is that I touched a lot on how this email works when you have a donor who works for matching gifts company, so a match-eligible donor, but you can also automate matching gift emails to donors, even if you don’t know their employment status.

So let’s say maybe you have a donor that went through the donation process and, they didn’t actually interact with the 360MatchPro employment search field during the donation process itself. You still want to make sure that you target those donors in matching gift messaging. Especially, because a lot of donors, like we’ve said, don’t know about their matching gift program.

So it’s very probable that they went through the donation process and, they just didn’t think that this matching gift thing applied to them. Because they’ve never heard of it before. They don’t know if their employer offers a program. So being able to send these emails to donors with unknown employers is really valuable because you can say to them, did you know thousands of companies matched donations by their employees to organizations like ours. Visit our matching gift page to see if your company will match your gift.

And so that means that in these emails, you can send donors a direct link to actually discover their matching gift eligibility, and then submit their matching gift request. So I can show an example of that during our demo as well, but just important to note that even donors with unknown employers can still be prompted to submit a matching gift request.

And you can gather more employment data about those donors and ensure that they get that call to action, to be able to double their donation through these programs.

And then finally we have matching gift data. So I think I’ve alluded a couple of times to the 360MatchPro portal where you can customize different emails and things like that.

And so now bringing that to the front and center, 360MatchPro does provide nonprofits with a matching gift portal where they can log in and see their dashboard and discover a lot of aggregated stats and individualized stats. You can view it in different chart views, things like that, making it really easy to see how are your donors interacting with the matching gifts tools?

Are they primarily filling out the search field on the donation form? Are they opening your matching gift emails? And then something really cool about this is that you can even see when they initiate the matching gift request itself. So I’ve mentioned a little bit before, right? That we’re providing these donors with a direct link to their matching gift request, making it really easy for them to kick off that process.

So it’s neat because you can actually see if the donors are kicking that process off. And this is important because, you know, we mentioned a little bit before about those matching gift parameters, that there’s going to be some kind of timeline for when the companies themselves will actually fulfill the matching gift requests.

And so sometimes there’s a bit of a delay between when a donor actually submits their matching gift requests and when you get that payout. And so being able to track and filter how your donors are interacting with those matching gift tools makes it so much easier for you to see exactly how that’s working and be able to understand just what matching gifts should be coming in and what opportunities you still have to pursue matching gifts with donors.

So I know that was a lot of information about how the actual integration is going to work itself. And so I think it’ll be really cool to now see it in action and be able to tell just how 360MatchPro works with Allegiance. So you guys should be able to see an Allegiance donation form on my screen right now here.

I want to note, this is a very plain Jane form. We’re just using it for the purposes of demoing. So definitely a lot of capabilities to customize this, but this is the basic donation form option that I’m using for the purpose of this demo. Feel free to shoot me a chat if for some reason you can’t see this, but hopefully this should be available to everybody.

And as you can see here, this is just a standard donation form. initially there’s not really a ton of information that’s going to be changed on here. And so that’s because we really just have that employer search field that I alluded to before. So I’m going to go ahead and fill out this information.

Might take me a second here as I’m talking to you guys. And so as the donor fills out this form, they’re just going to have their regular information going through. And it’s not until we get to the employer matching gift section, that you’re going to be able to see exactly how the tool works. And then we see this option out here. Does your employer match your contribution? And this is that search field that I alluded to before. So our donor could type in the name of the Home Depot. And you can see this search powered by Double the Donation with these different matching gift options populating down here.

So even if the donor maybe has a spelling error, if you see I have two Es in Home, or maybe they type in a company like ESPN, like I mentioned before, which is the Walt Disney’s, child company. Then they’d still be matched to the correct matching gift request form following the donation. So I’m going to have my donor go ahead and select Home Depot, and then they’d be able to click Continue and go to the next step where I will then have to fill out my mock credit card information, purpose of this demo.

And so once the donor goes through this process, they’ll, of course be taken to the confirmation page with the matching gift submission form. So here’s like a plain submission page, and then we have this matching gift plug in down here. So this is really awesome because I’ve been alluding a lot to this matching gift form where the donor could select this option and then go directly to the Home Depot’s matching gift page.

So that makes it just really easy, of course, for them to kick off this process and, then doubled their donation with matching gifts. You can see we also have the guidelines on here. We have the different match amounts summarized, just a wealth of information on the confirmation page so that your donor can learn a little bit more about their matching gift program.

But I think the main value add here is that, of course we now know not only where the donor works, which can be valuable for a lot of reasons, but we know that their gift is going to qualify for their matching gift program. So we can give them this direct link here, and it’s all completely automated, no extra work for your organization.

And so now I’m going to show you an example of a matching gift email that we have from this example, Cat Rescue Club. So you can see here that it says, we’re excited to let you know that your gift is eligible for matching gift requests from the Home Depot. And here once again, is that link for the donor to kick off the matching gift process, which is super exciting because that means that the donor can just still have this opportunity, once again, through their email to double their donation with just one click. You can also let your donors let you know when they’ve submitted their matching gift requests that will populate as a donor verified option in your matching gift portal. And even if there’s information they want to get about your donation not being eligible for a matching gift, maybe there’s some type of update to their matching gift program, they want to let us know, all of that is available in the email and totally customizable by yourself. And of course, a summary of the employer’s matching gift program through volunteer grant program, tons of information for the donor to explore. So there’s a lot of info about kind of the donor side of things and how they’re process will look.

But now I’m going to go ahead and pull up a 360MatchPro dashboard so that you guys can check out the backend from the nonprofit side of things. So this dashboard is something that’s accessible by nonprofits and fundraisers, not by the donors themselves. And so here, this is the main page, the main dashboard of 360MatchPro.

And you can see that it has some of that aggregated data that I alluded to earlier. So you can see how many matches were identified in the past year, how many donors are opening one or more emails in the past year, how they’re engaging with those emails, even. So like whether they’re accessing the search tools and the matching gift forms or guidelines, things like that, all available on this page here.

I also really like the match, identify donations in dollars per month. Cause I think that can be really helpful if you run any kind of matching gift campaign or maybe you’re trying to do a matching gift push, like right around Giving Tuesday or End of Year or something like that. It can be really helpful to see just how that breakdown is coming in on a month to month basis.

Final feature I want to point out on this page is the top companies selected by donors in the past year, because if you ever do anything with any kind of corporate sponsorships or partnerships or something like that, it can be really cool to see where most of your donors work. So maybe if you’re a more local organization, you know, you serve your community, then you could really see a lot of interesting company information coming in from local organizations.

For example, I’m based in Atlanta. Things like Home Depot based here, Delta, Coca-Cola a bunch of other big companies. And so if I were a local Atlanta based nonprofit, I’d be really interested to know that, right? Like most of my donors work kind of what option are they selecting on the donation field?

So that’s this aggregated summarized dashboard page, but I can also click the donations tab in my 360MatchPro portal and see a lot of more individualized donor data. So you can see a donation just came in here for myself, work for the company The Home Depot. And you’ll notice that this is hyperlinked, so if you wanted to see more information about the Home Depot’s matching gift program, this is something you could access as well. So all of that information is placed here, or you can even see the deadline for donors to submit their matching gift requests. So maybe if you want to do any kind of like calls to actions or the time of the deadlines, you could do that as well.

All of that stored in your dashboard. I also want to point to the status option here. So you can see these different statuses that come in for the different donation records. And so you’ll notice this one, for example, says match initiated. So that means that we know that this donor actually selected the option to initiate their match either from the confirmation page or from the matching gift email that they were sent.

I also mentioned that donor verification button in the matching gift email, that’s going to be populated in this 360MatchPro portal as well as you can see. You also see the waiting for donor status. So that just means that the donors actually made a donation. We know they qualify for a matching gift, but we’re still waiting to see if they’ll take action.

And then the final component I want to talk about here is this emails tab. So this is a demo account, of course. So we have mixed amounts of email messaging opening, but you can see if, an email has been sent, whether the donors open that email, you can see if emails are scheduled to be sent all different types of things like that, to check how your donors are actually interacting with those matching gift emails that we have here.

So this is the donation tab, all of that individualized donor records. And of course, if you want to ever filter by things like status, so that maybe if you’re like waiting for a donor and you want to send a follow-up message to all of those people, you certainly can filter and send messages in that way as well.

The next piece I want to go over here is the automated outreach tab. So you can see that there’s this automated outreach piece on the side of the screen and that we have different statuses listed below. So the first one I’m going to click is match-eligible. So this is of course, the place that you could configure automated emails going to your match-eligible donors.

So we saw an example of that before, when I pulled up that email, that these are the types of emails that would go out to donors who qualify for a matching gift program. And that’s of course, all completely configurable here. And you can even send these on or off determine how many hours after the donation is submitted that you want to send them out, change the subject line, and all different types of information like that.

You can also configure follow-up streams here. So here’s an example of a follow-up email. Maybe you want to send only one email to your donors after the donation process, maybe you want to send two or three. Really totally up to you, all configurable in the account. There’s of course also the unknown company tab. I know we mentioned that briefly as well. So say you have a donor that you don’t know where they work. You can send them an email like this one saying, we appreciate your support. Did you know we raised a million dollars from matching gift programs, check below to see if you’re eligible. If your donors were to select a link like that, they’d be taken to your matching gift page, which 360MatchPro sets up for you, so that they could then enter the name of their employer and still go to their matching gift form.

And all of that would still be tracked in the 360MatchPro dashboard. So I know that this was a lot of information about the 360MatchPro functionality, things like that. And this is of course just scratching the surface of exactly how 360MatchPro can work. I’m going to take a moment here to hand it back over to Sarah, to talk a little bit about how this will look in the Allegiance Group + Pursuant side of things.

And of course, as we’re talking, if you have questions or want to put anything in the chat, feel free to do and we’ll make sure to answer any questions at the end.

Sarah: Cool. All righty. I just whipped together a few little pieces of information. I’m not going to go too far in depth as to how we would work with Double the Donation in the Matching Gift Module. I do just want to point out on this first slide that you do have to have a gateway record built in your Allegiance Group + Pursuant database in order for you to be able to work with Double the Donation.

The gateway record couldn’t be any more simple. The API key and the public key are provided to you by Double the Donation. And then you simply just check that little box above the public key to send the donation info to Double the Donations 360MatchPro. That is really about all there is to it for that gateway.

It couldn’t, like I said, it can’t be any easier. This is an example of one of the test transactions that Julia pushed through on that super simple donation page that she showed. This isn’t the one from today, but one from a couple of days ago. And you can see down at the bottom, I have clicked on the matching tab, and you can see that the Home Depot was listed there at the bottom, I’ve outlined it in green.

This information will be imported into the database, along with the pledge transaction. If the company does not have an account record in the matching gift affiliation, the system will create one for that company. If it does exist in the database already, it will update the information at that time. So if somebody has initiated a match with the Home Depot four or five years ago, and maybe they’ve changed their matching programs slightly since then, the system won’t update anything that’s in the past.

But if that donor comes back and indicates again, that they’re still working with the Home Depot, then it would go through and it would update any information. The first time somebody makes a match with the Home Depot after information has been changed on Double the Donation’s end. Hopefully that makes sense.

So I know Julia, that was a question that you had asked me the other day, so it doesn’t just automatically update. Somebody would have to initiate that match on a donation form to get updated information into Allegiance. In this example, the Home Depot’s matching gift program account did not exist. So it created a brand new account when that transaction was imported.

So Julia’s information was imported in just like any other web transaction would have been. And at the same time it created this account. It also does a relationship match, which is something that is unique to Allegiance, at least the wording is, and it indicates that on the screen in the back, you can see outlined in green, that under the Home Depot match program, it does list Julia as an employee of the Home Depot.

And then on Julia’s record indicates that her employer is the Home Depot. The really great thing about this is in our Matching Gift Module. If Julia comes along and makes another donation say at the end of the calendar year, and she forgets to indicate that she works at Home Depot, you can actually run a report out of our module that will show you all of the pledges that somebody has made that could potentially be matched. And so Julia’s name would pop out with a $50 end of the year donation and that she works at the Home Depot. And then you can send her a little nudge of an email and say, don’t forget, if you can fill out the paperwork or the online forms to get that donation match, that’d be great. But Allegiance Group + Pursuant really will try to work with you as much as possible to make sure that you are getting your matching money.

On that Home Depot matching account that was just created, I did go ahead and click on that icon of that little present up there, it is a gift, a matching gift, which is why that icon was selected. And you can see that this screen pops up. There are three tabs down the left side of this pop-up screen.

The first one is the company info. It tells you what the maximum match amount is. Then those two radio buttons at the bottom for Forms Required and Forms in Stock. Those are back to the good old days when everything was still on paper.

The second tab, this is the information that’s provided back to us by Double the Donation. So we get the company, the corporate contact, the region, and then there’s two links there. One that clicks through to the matching gift form, which Julia showed you when she was presenting her slides. And the second one is the matching gift guidelines.

And I did check both of those links and I got to the exact same place that Julia was showing you.

Any questions from our Allegiance Group + Pursuant users on this section? I do have a little bit coming up about WeDidIt (now called Allyra), but you saw what it looks like on the classic page, that’s what Julia was using. What it looks like when it comes into the transaction bin. And if the donation comes from a classic Allegiance page, it will create the company account or update it. All of that is standard with the Allegiance Classic. My next slide. I’m going to talk a little bit about WeDidIt and what we have now and what’s coming.

I do just want to take a little bit of time to talk a little bit about what’s going on with, WeDidIt. I do know that Julia is working with our project manager for WeDidIt. So they are working on making some changes. As of right now, WeDidIt does ask the donor who their employer is, and it sends that information back to 360MatchPro.

However at this time, the company information does not come back into Allegiance Group + Pursuant via the transaction bin. So that means, an account would not be created in the database, but you can still use all of the tools and 360MatchPro to remind your donors to fill out the required information for the match.

And then of course. when the money comes from their employer, you can then create or update that company as account information in Allegiance Group + Pursuant when they’re matching money arrives. I do believe that the goal going forward would be to have that company information come in on the, WeDidIt transactions too. But we’re working on that, and when that’s available I’m sure we will let everybody know. I did include in my slide deck, a few additional resources, just a copy of the user guide, the integration guide for Double the Donation and then a webinar on the Matching Gift Module and the integrations that we have. And that particular webinar does go into a little bit more of the nitty gritty on how to actually do things and post payments and things like that.

That is the end of my brief presentation. So now we’ll open it up to questions. If you have any about Double the Donation, how it works in Allegiance, I do just remind you that we cannot see your individual database. So we would only be able to really answer things on a general level, but we can certainly take questions now.

And if you do have questions that are specific to your database, we would just get back to you after the webinar is done.

I did have a question for you, Julia, on something that you presented at the end of your section, you talked about the emails that you can send to donors to remind them to initiate that match. If they click on that first email that goes out, does it then acknowledge that and then not suggest that they receive a second?

Julia: Yeah, that’s a great question. So yeah, that’s all completely configurable within the 360MatchPro portal of if you want those follow-ups to go out or not. So it’s up to you as the nonprofit to choose that option, yep.

Sarah: Okay. All right. Anybody else have any questions? I can’t be the only one.

Julia: While we’re waiting for anybody to put questions in the chat, one question that I get a lot during presentations like this one is sometimes people will ask a little bit about that matching gift database that I mentioned, that the search tool is pulling from to provide the correct next steps to the donor. So that’s something that the Double the Donation team builds using both our corporate partnerships, resources that we find online and information from donors and nonprofits alike. So that’s something that’s fully compiled. I actually have resources I’m thinking about it that I can put in the chat, with some information about that database, just in case you guys are curious about how that works.

Sarah: Great. Well, no one has typed in any questions, so I think we’re going to wrap it up for the day. Thank you, Julia, so much for joining us today. Thank you everybody else for joining us and we will see many of you next month.

Have a great afternoon.